Chapter XIV

When the Venetian doctor left him he took the phial of serum, the inoculating syringe, and another smaller bottle containing a clear liquid, which was the toxin or virus of the malady, and which he had not shown to the Venetian. He put these together in the breast pocket of his coat. He had no belief in the efficacy of the serum, but he had prepared the venom of the toxin himself; and in that small glass tube there was poison enough to slay twelve men.

“If there be no other way,” he repeated to himself as he went back to the hotel through the moonlit canals and under the ancient houses.

The dual meaning which lay in the words was like a devil’s laugh in his ears.

He looked up at the Ca’ Zaranegra as he passed it; its windows were all dark, and the white lilies on the balconies had no light upon them save that from the rays of the moon.

As he entered the lighted hall of the hotel they handed to him a telegram. It was from the Princess Adrianis. She had received his despatch twelve hours late, as she had been in her summer palace in the mountains; she had left Sicily immediately, and said that she would travel without pause at the utmost speed possible. She added: “I commend my darling to God and to you.”

Damer crushed the paper up in his hand with a nervous gesture and flung it out, by the open doorway, into the water below.

Then he ascended the staircase, and entered his patient’s room.

The night was very warm; the windows stood wide open; there was a shaded porcelain lamp alight on the table. One nun watched whilst the other slept. Adrianis lay still on the great bed in the shadow; he was awake, his eyes were looking upward, his mouth was open but his breathing was easier and less hard.

The sister of charity whispered to Damer, “I think he is better. The fungus growth seems loosening. We have given the wine and the meat essence. He could swallow.”

He lit a candle and approached the bed. Adrianis smiled faintly. He could not speak.

“Let me see your throat,” said Damer.

He saw that the nun had spoken truly; the fungus growth was wasting, the false membrane was shrinking; there was a healthier look on the tongue. He set the lamp down and said nothing.

“Is he not better?” said the sister, anxiously.

“Perhaps,” he replied. “If there be no re-formation of the false membrane he may be saved. Go, my good woman, and rest while you can.”

She went, nothing loth, to her supper and her bed. Damer was alone with the man who trusted him and whose mother trusted him.

He went away from the bedside and sat down by one of the windows. His heart had long years before been rendered dumb and dead; his mind alone remained alive and his passions.

He stayed in the open air, looking down on the green water.

“Man cannot control circumstances,” he thought, “but the wise man can assist circumstance, the fool does not.”

He had in him that fell egotism of science which chokes the fountain of mercy at its well-springs in blood. He sat by the window and looked out absently at the night.

He knew that the nun was right; he knew that the disease was passing away from the sick man; that, if left alone, sleep and youth would restore him to health, to love, and joy.

Should he leave him alone?

Should he let him live to become the lover and lord of Veronica Zaranegra? Should he let those two mindless, flowerlike lives lean together, and embrace, and multiply?

It would be what men called a crime, but his school despises the trivial laws of men, knowing that for the wise there is no such thing as crime and no such thing as virtue—only lesions of the brain, and absence of temptation and opportunity.

The mother of Adrianis could not be there before another day, travel as rapidly as she would. He knew the effect of affection on the nervous system, and that the sight and sense of a beloved person near them often gave to enfeebled frames the power of resistance and recovery. Those emotions were not in himself, but he recognised their existence, and he knew that in Adrianis the emotions and the affections were very strong in proportion as the mental powers were slight.

He must not await the arrival of the princess. He had before been witness of her devotion, of her skill in illness, of her fortitude, and of the love existing between her and her son. They were powers he despised and never pitied, as he never pitied the love of the nursing bitch from whom he removed her litter that he might watch her die of the agony of her bursting teats. But he was conscious of the existence of such powers; and the physiologist ignores no facts which he has demonstrated, though they may belong to an order with which he has no sympathy.

He knew that he must not allow the mother of Adrianis to arrive in time to see her son alive.

“What thou doest, do quickly,” he murmured in words which he had heard in his childhood as he had sat in the old parish church of his native village.

He rose and walked to the bed.

Adrianis still seemed to sleep, the breathing was heavy and forced chiefly through the nasal passages; but there was a look of returning serenity on his features: a look which the man of science is well aware precedes recovery, not death.

As surely as any one can gauge the unseen future, he was sure that if let alone the young man would recover, would in a week or two arise unharmed from his bed. He was equally sure that he had himself, in his breast, the means of changing that process of recovery into the agony of dissolution. He no longer hesitated; he no longer doubted. He went to the adjacent chamber, where the two nuns, still dressed, were sleeping. He awakened them.

“Come,” he said, gently. “He is worse. I am about to try the cure of Behring. It may succeed. There is no other chance. It will be necessary to hold him. I require you both.”

He was well aware that it would be unwise to essay that operation alone—it would rouse comment in the day to come.

“Hold him motionless,” he said to the two women. “Do not awake him if you can avoid it.”

He filled the inoculating syringe from one of the little phials which he had brought from the Fondamente. He stood in the full light of the lamp so that the two sisters could see all that he did.

“Loosen his shirt,” he said to them. Adrianis still slept; in his predisposition to sleep the few drops of chloral which had been administered twenty minutes earlier, had sufficed to render him almost insensible.

Damer bent over him and inserted the injecting-needle into one of the veins; the incision disturbed him without wholly loosening the bonds of the soporific; he struggled slightly, moaned a little, but the nuns succeeded in resisting his endeavour to rise; the inoculation was successfully made.

The face of Damer in the lamplight was not paler than usual, but his hand trembled as he withdrew the syringe.

“What is Behring’s cure?” asked the nun who felt most interest in her patient.

“An antitoxin; the serum of an immune beast,” he answered, calmly, as he turned slightly towards her. The nun did not understand, but she was afraid of troubling him with other questions.

He walked to the window and stood looking out at the moonlit water.

He had left on a table the syringe and the phial of serum which was half empty. But in the breast pocket of his coat he had the phial of toxin, and that phial was wholly empty. The nuns, engrossed in holding down Adrianis, had not seen that the glass tube on the table was not the one from which the syringe had been filled; and, when used, Damer had plunged the syringe immediately into a bowl of disinfecting acid. There was no trace anywhere that the toxin had been used instead of the serum; no trace whatever save in the tumifying vein of the sick man’s throat.

“You had better stay near him, you may be wanted, and it is two o’clock,” said Damer to the nurses. “I shall remain here. There will be, I hope, a great change soon.”

He went out on to the balcony and turned his back on the watching women and leaned against the iron-work, looking down on the canal, where nothing moved except the slow, scarcely visible ripple of the water. He was human though he had killed his humanity, replacing it by intellect alone. He suffered in that moment; a vague sense of what ignorance calls crime was on him painfully; he had emancipated himself wholly from the superstitions and prejudices of men, but he was conscious that he had now done that which, if known, would put him outside the pale of their laws.

He did not repent or regret; he did not see any evil in his act. The right of the strong, the right of the sage was his; he had but exercised his reason to produce an issue he desired.

So he thought as he leaned against the iron scroll work and watched the thick, dark water glide by past the marble steps of the Salute. There was a faint light in the sky on the east, but he could not see the east where he stood; it was still completely night between the walls of the Grand Canal. The voice of a man called up to him from the darkness below.

“Madam sends me to know how goes it with the prince?”

Damer looked down. “Tell the Countess Zaranegra that things are as they were. A new remedy has been essayed.”

The man who had come by the calle retired by them, swinging a lantern in his hand.

The two Vulcans of the clock-tower, hard by in St. Mark’s square, struck four times upon their anvil. Damer looked up the darkness of the canal where nothing was to be seen but the lamps which burned on either side of it with their reflections, and the lanthorns tied to poles before some of the palaces. He could not see the Ca’ Zaranegra, which was not in sight even in the day, but he saw it in remembrance with its flowering balconies, its tapestried chambers, its red and white awnings, its great escutcheon over its portals. He saw her in his vision as she must be now—awake, listening for her messenger’s return, in some white, loose gown no doubt, with her hair loose, too, upon her shoulders, her face white, her eyes strained in anxiety, as he had seen them that afternoon and evening.

If Adrianis had lived she would have been his wife: that was as certain as that the sea was beating on the bar of Malomocco underneath the moon.

“I have done well; I have exercised my supremacy,” he thought. “We have right of life and death over all birds, and beasts, and things which swim and crawl, by virtue of our greater brain; in like manner has the greater brain the right to deal as it will with the weaker brain when their paths meet and one must yield and go under. The fool hath said that there is sanctity in life, but the man of science has never said it. To him one organism or another has the same measure in his scales.”

Strangely enough, at that moment and incongruously there came to him a remembrance of his own childish days: of sitting by his mother’s side in the little, dark, damp church of their northern hamlet, and reading written on their tablets the Twelve Commandments.

“Mother, what is it to do murder?” he had asked her; and she had answered, “It is to take life; to destroy what we cannot recall.”

He remembered how, some weeks later, when he had killed from wantonness a mole which ran across a road, he had been frightened and had gone to his mother and said to her, “Mother, mother, I have done murder. I have taken life and I cannot recall it.” And his mother had smiled and answered, “That is not murder, my dear. A little mole is a dumb creature.”

But his mother had been wrong, as the world was wrong. Whether the organism were animal or human, what difference was there? Only a difference of brain.

The world and its lawgivers might and would still say that what destroyed the human organism was murder, that is, a crime; but to the trained, logical, strong reason of Damer the sophism was a premiss untenable. To slay a man was no more than to slay a mole. To do either was to arrest a mechanism, to dissolve tissues, to send elements back into the space they came from; it was nothing more. One organism or another, what matter?

Since that day in the dim long ago, he had taken life, not once, not twice, but thousands of times, causing the greatest and most lingering agony in its inflictions. But in his opinion that had not been murder; it had been only torture and slaughter of dumb creatures according to human law. What difference could there be if, by accident, the creature to be removed were human?

He was consistent enough, and sincere enough to follow out the theories of the laboratory to their logical sequence without flinching. He honestly held himself without blame.

He was only a man, and therefore he felt some sickly sense of pain when he heard in the still and waning night the sound of his victim’s convulsive struggles to gain breath; but he held himself without blame, for every thesis and every deduction of the priesthood of science justified and made permissible his action to bring about a catastrophe which was necessary to him.

Science bade him take all the other sentient races of earth and make them suffer as he chose and kill them as he chose. Those other races were organisms as susceptible as the human organisms. Why should the human organism enjoy immunity?

He had done no more than is done for sake of experiment or observation in the hospital or the laboratory every day all over the known world. The reluctance to face what he had done was merely that residue of early influences and impressions which remains in the soul of the strongest, haunting its remembrances and emasculating its resolution.

He called up to his command that volition, that power of will which had never failed him; he returned to the bedside as he would have returned to visit a dog dying under the pressure of eight atmospheres.

Adrianis still lay in the same position. About the almost invisible orifice where the needle had punctured there was a slight tumified swelling.

“He seems worse,” whispered the nun.

“He cannot be either better or worse as yet,” replied Damer, truthfully. “Give him a little wine, if he can take it.”

They might give him what they chose; they could not now save him from death. He had received enough of the virus into his vein to slay a man in health. Passing as it did into an organ already diseased, he would die before the sun rose, or an hour after.

He had aided nature to destroy her own work. There was nothing new or criminal in that—nature was for ever creating and destroying. Once it had suited him to save that young man’s life; now it suited him to end it.

One action was as wrong or as righteous as the other. It was an exercise of power, as when the monarch grants an amnesty or signs a death warrant. Who blames the monarch who does but use his power? The prerogative of superior reason is higher than the prerogative of a monarch. Moreover, who would ever know it? Who would ever be aware that the intenser virus of the toxin had mingled with the natural formation of the disease?

Even were there an autopsy, discovery would be impossible; the concentrated venom had mingled with and been absorbed in the common and usual growth of the false membrane. He had but aided death instead of hindering it.

His professional conscience would have shrunk from giving the disease, but it did not shrink from making death certain where it was merely possible. He did but add a stronger poison to that which nature had already poisoned.

Men slew their rivals in duels and no one blamed them; who should blame him because he used the finer weapon of science instead of the coarser weapon of steel? He did but carry out the doctrine of the laboratory to its just and logical sequence.

What he felt for Veronica was not love, but passion, and not passion alone, but the sense of dominion. He knew that the fair creature shrank from him but submitted to him. All the intense instinctive tyranny of his nature longed to exercise itself on her, the beautiful and patrician thing, so far above him, so fragile and so fair. He knew that he would never possess her or command her except through fear; but this would suffice to him. The finer and more delicate elements of love were indifferent to him, were indeed unknown. They had existed in Adrianis, whom he had despised; but in his own temperament they could find no dwelling-place. His desires were brutal as had ever been those of Attila, whose throne lies low amongst the grass on Torcello.

Late at night and early at dawn messengers came from some noble families in the city, and the Ca’ Zaranegra. Damer replied to all inquiries, “It is impossible to say what turn the disease may take.”

Damer said nothing. He looked out at the marble church which had no message for him, and down the moonlit waters which had no beauty for him. He was absorbed in meditation. His will desired to do that from which his natural weakness shrank; for in his great strength he was still weak being human. The infliction of death was nothing to him; could be nothing; he was used to kill as he was used to torture with profound indifference, with no more hesitation, than he ate or drank or fulfilled any natural function of his body. To obtain knowledge, even the approach of knowledge, he would have inflicted the most agonising and the most endless suffering without a moment’s doubt or a moment’s regret. From his boyhood upwards he had always lived in the hells created by modern science, wherein if the bodies of animals suffer the souls of men wither and perish. What was the man lying sleeping there to him? Only an organism like those which daily he broke up and destroyed and threw aside. Only an organism, filled by millions of other invisible organisms by a myriad of parasite animalculæ, numerous as the star-dust in the skies.

The woman whom he desired was nothing more; he could not deem her more; he scorned himself for the empire over him of his own desire of her perishable form, of her foolish butterfly life. He himself was no more, but there was alight in him that light of the intellect which in his own esteem raised him above them into an empyrean unknown by them. His intellect made him as Cæsar, as Pharaoh; their foolishness made them as slaves.

The time is nigh at hand when there will be no priests and no kings but those of science, and beneath their feet the nations will grovel in terror and writhe in death.

He went out again into the balcony, leaving the nuns to endeavour to administer the wine, which, however, their patient could not swallow, the fungus growth closed his larynx. His head was thrown back on the pillows; his eyes were staring but sightless; his face was pallid and looked blue round the mouth and about the temples. He was now straining for breath; like a horse fallen on the road, blown and broken.

They called loudly to Damer, being frightened and horrified. He re-entered the chamber.

“He is worse,” he said, gravely.

The nun, who had a tender heart, wept. Damer sat down by the bed. He had seen that struggle for air a thousand times in all the hospitals of Europe. It could now have but one end.

A little while after they brought him a note and a telegram. The first was from the Countess Zaranegra. It said: “You must let me see him. It is my right, my place.”

The second was from the mother of Adrianis; it said: “I have reached Bologna; I shall soon be with you. God bless you for your goodness to my son.”

He read them, and tore the one in pieces and flung the pieces in the canal; the other he put in his breast pocket beside the empty phial of toxin.

The mother’s letter would be useful if any called in question the too late usage of the Behring serum. It would show the complete confidence placed in him by the writer. At that moment his two Venetian colleagues arrived. The day had dawned. The women put out the light of the lamps.

“You have given the antitoxin?” said the elder of the Venetians, glancing at the syringe.

“I have,” replied Damer. “But, I believe, too late.”

“I fear too late,” replied the Venetian. “Not less admirable is your courage in accepting such responsibility.”

Damer bowed. He looked grave and worn, which was natural in a man who had been in anxious vigil through thirty-six hours by the bedside of his friend.

“Have you any hope?” whispered the Venetian.

“I confess none, now,” he answered.

The pure light of earliest daybreak was in the whole of the vast chamber.

It shone on that ghastly sight, a man dying in his youth, struggling and straining for a breath of air, fighting against suffocation.

The fresh sea air was flowing through the room, sweet with the odours of fruits and flowers, free to the poorest wretch that lived. But in all that bounteous liberty and radiance of air he could not draw one breath, he could not reach one wave of it, to slake his thirst of life.

The poisoned growth filled every chink of the air passages as though they were tubes mortared up and closed hermetically. His face grew purple and tumid, his eyes started from their sockets, his arms waved wildly, beckoning in space; he had no sense left except the mere instinctive mechanical effort to gasp for the air which he was never to breathe again. The five persons round him stood in silence, while the stifled sobs of the nun were heard; the splash of oars echoed from the water below; somewhere without a bird sang.

The Venetians spoke one with another, then turned to Damer.

“The end must be near. We ought to call in the assistance of the Church. We must not let him perish thus, unshrived, unannealed, like a pagan, like a dumb creature.”

“Do whatever you deem right,” replied Damer. “With those matters I do not meddle.”

The minutes went on; the nuns sank on their knees; the one who wept hid her face on the coverlet of the bed. All which had so lately been the youth, the form, the vitality of Adrianis wrestled with death as a young lion tears at the walls of the den which imprisons him. The terrible choking sounds roared through the air to which his closed throat could not open. Blood foamed in froth from his lips, which were curled up over the white teeth, and were cracked and blue. His eyes, starting from their orbits, had no sight. Damer ceased to look; almost he regretted that which he had done.

Suddenly the convulsions ceased.

“He is out of pain,” said one of the Venetians, in a solemn and hushed voice.

“He is dead,” said Damer.

The women crossed themselves.

The little bird outside sang loudly.

The door opened, and the mother of Adrianis stood on the threshold.

* * * * *

Six months later the man who had killed him wedded Veronica Zaranegra. Her family opposed, and her friends warned her, in vain; she shrank from him, she feared him, she abhorred him, but the magnetism of his will governed hers till he shaped her conduct at his choice, as the hand of the sculptor moulds the clay.

He became master of her person, of her fortune, of her destiny; but her soul, frightened and dumb, forever escapes from him, and hides in the caverns of memory and regret.

UNWIN BROS., PRINTERS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected after careful
comparison with other occurrences within the text and
consultation of external sources.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and
inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

First illustration “Adrianus” changed to “Adrianis” in illustration caption.
Pg 15 “to and fro like driftword” to “to and fro like driftwood”.
Pg 90 “the poor women in the Salpétrière” to “the poor women in
the Salpêtrière”.